templating and interfacing an entire news site

Anon

I work for a news publisher, not the largest, but a good sized metro area all the same.

I've been working two months on a project that will allow our newsroom to cut and paste news stories from QPS (our Quark publishing) into a php-based interface, instantly creating flat html pages (the pages must be flat in order to work on our slow-ass servers; company rules).

I'm using php4 and MySQL to create templates in several tables; a table for the header/footer/and 'meat' of a page, as well as a 'form' that is called when an administrator needs to enter a story (such as 'movie review' or 'local news').

The problem I'm coming to is the 'main' section pages. I've created 51 templates (there are 51 possible pages, from dining reviews, to general news stories, to a golf course review) for each story choice, but now I need to create a method for placing 'front page' stories.
There are 11 sections: movies, dining, golf, theater and arts, local news, etc etc. Each of these pages, as well as one master 'home' page, need to show some selected headlines in a selected order.

Based on this information, I need to figure out the best method to have an administrator choose his top stories for each section, the order they will appear in, and whether or not to include 'art'.

Has anyone worked on a project of this size, remembering that all pages must be flat, and not php? But the dev. environment, and the administration/creation area can and is php-based.

Thanks!

Anon

i have developed very similar site, although its fully php based. we do not have any flat HTML file at all. all the pages are php generated, infact there arent any php files exist on the server except 1 which handles every single request, and retrieves all the info needed from the db.

i also have have used database for the frontpages, which is php based too (dynamically generated). but of course you can use flat html files too.

the technique i used for frontpages, is to create a table called front_page and in that you have the news id's which you wish to be appeared on frontpage. and it will then fetch the required info about that news, but looking up the correct ID in its own table.

you can do all that by creating html files, except every new entry or removal from the frontpages will re-generate the flat html file.

you can lookup my site:
http://www.shianews.com

and if you need some more info, i will be happy to share it.

good luck,
Daarius...

Anon

Great site.

What I'm looking to generate is several 'fronts', all flat-file based.

The other issue I'm facing: This version will be used for a twice-weekly updated news magazine (with issue dates), but it needs to work for a future multiple-updates-per-day version, for our flagship news product.

If you could talk a little with me about how you worked out the table structure for stories, such as:
do you place all stories in one table, with a short 1-paragraph 'lead-in', art, etc?
how are stories entered into the table?
how are stories marked for 'sections', such as 'the americas, or 'asia'?

Anything you can share would be great!

thanks again.